Mobile Social Location, a Practical Guide

It’s a great time to be building mobile location apps. Phones with GPS and compasses are now widely deployed, with good mobile data plans available. Projects like Geonames and OpenStreetMap are creating reusable datasets that provide the data backbone for your service. Open source mapping and GIS software is getting better and better.

This talk will focus on the social dimension of this growth area. How do applications like Foursquare, the Dopplr Social Atlas and Twitter (with its new geolocation API features) bring people into the equation? We’ll explore how location data can be improved through the collective intelligence of a social network. Discover how data gathered in a social and geographic context through an iPhone app can be more powerful than data entered through a web form.

We’ll consider how the interaction design of a service can be as important as its database schema for successful data analysis. For developers we’ll highlight the most interesting software out there, and give a comparison between the different platforms and styles of application available to you.